Politics and Culture

June 27, 2017

Yes another MEMRI clip. This one is extraordinary. Yazidi Iraqi MP Vian Dakhil recounts some of the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS against Yazidis:

"One of the women whom we managed to retrieve from ISIS said that she was held in a cellar for three days, without food or anything. Afterwards, they brought her a plate of rice and meat. She ate the food because she was very hungry. When she finished, they said to her: We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate. […]

"One of the girls said that they took six of her sisters. Her youngest sister, a ten-year-old girl, was raped to death in front of her father and sisters. She was ten years old. The question that we keep asking is: 'Why?' Why did these savages do this to us?"

A novel take on the issue of female circumcision, or, as most people now refer to it, female genital mutilation. Egyptian cleric Abd Al-Wahhab Al-Maligi:

"The first time that this subject was debated extensively was in the past century. Who were the first to talk about it? The Jews. They do not want Islam or the Muslims to be pure, developed, and civilized.

"In the Protocols of the Elders of Zion it is written, "We must strive for the collapse of morals so that it will be easier for us to dominate the world."

"They tell you that female circumcision causes infertility. Says who? How can female circumcision cause infertility?! Egyptian women are circumcised, yet they give birth more than all the other mothers in the world. Allah be praised!

"It is the uncircumcised women of Europe who are infertile. Allah be praised!

Are there economic benefits to female circumcision? Yes!... Female circumcision is a preventive medical measure. Someone who is uncircumcised will be afflicted with many serious diseases.... Someone who contracts one of these diseases must spend money, and the state must spend money on the treatment, and so on. But we can save all this money and spend it elsewhere."

Earl Hines, American piano player and band leader. Jimmy Archey, American trombone player. Francis Joseph "Muggsy" Spanier, American cornet player and band leader.Earl Watkins, American drummer. San Francisco, California, USA. 1958

J-TV presents a documentary about the rise of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. The film gives a voice to those who felt ignored in the Chakrabarti Report on anti-Semitism. Presented by Sociology Lecturer of Goldsmiths University David Hirsh:

Proposed collaboration between North and South Korea at the 2018 Winter Olympics has been welcomed by the International Olympic Committee.

According to reports, South Korea sports minister Do Jong-hwan said North Korea could host some skiing events.

He also said the countries may enter a combined ice hockey team.

"We are happy to discuss his ideas. The Olympic movement is always about building bridges, never about erecting walls," said an IOC spokesperson.

"We are looking at the comments of the new minister of sport, culture and tourism with great interest."...

n comments reported by the Korea Herald, Do suggested the North and South could enter one women's ice hockey team, helping to make Pyeongchang a "peace Olympics".

He said he would discuss co-hosting at the Masikryong ski resort with Jang Woong, North Korea's delegate to the IOC.

The Masikryong ski resort is one of Kim Jong-un's vanity projects. It was built using commandeered army units, and stocked with foreign equipment that almost certainly got there in breach of international sanctions. There are stories that it's maintained by child work gangs. It is, of course, beyond the reach of all but the highest-ranking officials:

In short, it's dangerously naive to think this would be anything other than a propaganda coup for Pyongyang, and a kick in the teeth for the wretched North Koreans suffering under the world's most egregious violator of human rights. There have been calls urging the IOC not to "repeat the mistake of the 1936 Berlin Games" by allowing North Korea to co-host.

So I believe what Kim Jong Un would want the most is to have a security guarantee for his regime. So there is a possibility that Kim Jong Un continues to make the bluff with his nuclear weapons programs. But deep inside he is actually yearning or wanting dialogue. But in the end the only way to find out is to have a dialogue with North Korea.

That's no bluff with the nuclear weapons. And to believe that, deep inside, Kin Jong-un yearns for dialogue suggests a dangerous degree of delusion on Moon's part.

This week Moon will arrive in Washington for his first meeting with Trump. It promises to be something of a dialogue of the deaf; which is to say, a fiasco.

Update: amusingly it's the North Koreans who have snubbed the South over the Olympics.

It was supposed to be the opening gesture in a new chapter of co-operation between two of the world’s most deadly enemies. But North Korea has rejected a proposal by South Korea’s liberal president, Moon Jae-in, for a joint hosting of next year’s Winter Olympic Games.

The offer, by a president who has committed himself to engaging the Pyongyang regime, was all but dismissed by one of the North’s most senior sporting officials. The rebuff is a disappointing start to President Moon’s efforts to warm up relations after ten years of confrontation and sanctions under two conservative South Korean presidents....

The ideas were rejected by Chang Ung, North Korea’s single delegate to the International Olympic Committee. “It’s a bit late,” Mr Chang said. “When we fielded a joint team at the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships, there were 22 rounds of talks and they took five months. That is the reality that we’re faced with.”

Scott Abramson kicks off an Iran week at Tablet with an essay on Jalal Al-e Ahmad, perhaps the most influential Iranian intellectual of the Sixties and Seventies - the last decades of the Shah's reign - thanks to his 1962 pamphlet Gharbzadegi, or “Westoxification":

A “holy book for several generations of Iranian intellectuals” in one scholar’s appraisal, Gharbzadegi contends that Iranians who had embraced the West had become “strangers to themselves,” being at once unfaithful Iranians and sham Westerners. Worse yet, these Iranians were not just fraudulent but, as the title Westoxification indicates, they were diseased. All was not lost, though, because their disease had a cure: If the West was the toxin with which Iranians had poisoned themselves, Islam was the antidote.

Even Khomeini, unmoved normally by any book outside of Islamic holy scripture, was an admirer.

Yet, astonishingly to us now, Al-e Ahmad was a great admirer of Israel. The book he published after his two-week visit to Israel in 1963, has now been translated and published as The Israeli Republic.

Abramson's conclusion:

Nowhere else in the Muslim world did Jews both suffer so grievously and flourish so thoroughly. Forced conversions, pogroms, blood libels, and discriminatory legislation embittered the lot of Iranian Jews for centuries only to give way to the era of the Shah and his father (1925-1979), during which Iranian Jews enjoyed full civil equality, seldom met with violence, and even thrived to the point that by the 1970s, as the Iranian-born Israeli scholar David Menashri speculates, “on per capita terms they may well have been the richest Jewish community in the world.” If the likes of Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revel in denying the Holocaust, another of Iran’s sons saved many Jews from the Nazis’ death machine in the 1940s: While serving at the Iranian embassy in Paris, Abdol Hossein Sardari issued more than a thousand passports to Jews in France, thereby reducing the number of victims of a genocide the Islamic Republic insists did not happen. And if Iran’s government, more than any of its counterparts in the Middle East, is notorious for its anti-Semitic pronouncements and initiatives (e.g., the sponsorship of conferences that deny the Holocaust and of cartoon contests that ridicule it), a 2014 poll by the ADL found that Iran’s people are the least anti-Semitic in the world’s most anti-Semitic region. So, in light of all these paradoxes, maybe an Iranian intellectual who both admired Israel and inspired the Iranian Revolution is not so strange after all.

June 25, 2017

There’s a myth that Aliyah Saleem would like to debunk immediately. It is the myth of the “Muslim community leader”. If we really want to fight extremism, she argues, we should start by puncturing the idea that self-appointed male “leaders” represent a homogenous bloc of British Muslims. “Stop and ask 1,000 Muslims in the street, ‘Who’s your community leader?’ They’ll say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’,” said Ms Saleem, 27, one of a growing number of female activists standing up against Islamism.

After four terrorist attacks in the UK in as many months, she is fed up of hearing politicians’ platitudes about “working with Muslim leaders”. There has been little talk about working with Welsh “community leaders” after the Finsbury Park attack, over which Darren Osborne, from Cardiff, has been charged....

Every time she sees imams condemning the latest attack, she wonders where the women are. “If half the population is missing, then how effective can [any strategy] be? Misogyny and homophobia are like two pillars supporting Islamic extremism. If you knock them down, the whole thing collapses.”

Ms Saleem knows how dangerous the tolerance of intolerance can be. As a schoolgirl, she lost five years of her life at an Islamic boarding school in Nottingham. Its narrow curriculum and strict Sharia-inspired rules promised to make alimas (Islamic scholars) of its young charges. Instead, Ms Saleem believes it stunted her education and left young girls like her at serious risk of radicalisation.

“I was taught there was only one way to be a Muslim. I ended up believing that my mother and father and the rest of my Muslim family were going to hell.”

Ms Saleem, who is now vice-chairwoman of Faith to Faithless, a community support network for “apostates”, and describes herself as a former Muslim, recalls how a mother recently approached her for advice about a teenage daughter she feared was being radicalised.

“She said, ‘What shall I do?’ I said, don’t talk about religion at all. Find out what she enjoys to do — whether it’s sport, music, drama — and distract her with that. Because when your brain is filled with music, art, literature, ideas and culture, why would you be tempted? When I was radicalised, it was feminism that opened my eyes. I had always felt suffocated, forced to wear the hijab. But when I discovered feminist perspectives, it blew my mind. I started to challenge things. If you can challenge the notion that women must do this, women can’t do that, or else they’ll end up in a fiery pit, it forces you to challenge all the rest.

“Once you start to have a wider, scientific understanding of sexuality, you start to connect to the real world, and the fundamentalist argument starts to pale in comparison.”

She is astounded at how politicians can talk about tackling extremism but support the segregation of Muslim children along the lines of gender and ethnicity. “Enough is enough?” she scoffs. “Not if you’re alienating and segregating Muslim children — often poor, vulnerable Muslim children, in faith schools.”.

Poisonous ideas need a breeding ground, said Amina Lone, 45, a community activist, mother of four and co-director of the think tank the Social Action and Research Foundation. A recent conference, supposedly for a cross-section of British Muslims, left her furious. Not only were there about 18 women to 180 men, she was ignored by many imams, who refused to address a woman. This was not a mosque in small town but a digital summit at Google HQ in London — “a progressive, forward-thinking event, completely let down by lack of women. It drives me insane.

“I know a school in Birmingham that has just cancelled its swimming lessons for everyone because it was getting so much kickback from Muslim parents. I’ve been at a talk at a university campus when a young man challenged me because I refused to sit in segregated seating.” Sexism in the name of Islam has been tolerated for too long, she said.

“Why are we [not defending] our secular values? Where does it stop? These are hard-won freedoms. I live in Manchester, Suffragette City — why are we letting religious rights override gender rights? It is bonkers.”

Ms Lone, a British Pakistani born in Birmingham, also derided the idea of “Muslim community leaders” who claim to represent Islam. “The people in my council estate in Manchester — these people are my community, not some male ‘leaders’ who are self-appointed and self-interested.”...